Fracterebus is loosely based on characters from Greek mythology. In an effort to make as much sense as possible to someone that decides to do some mythological fact checking, I’ve been reading a lot. It’s entertaining research and I’m doing it for the ideas it can provide that might make my game or story interesting instead of for a pile of mythological facts. For a current bibliography of stuff I’m reading, head over to the wiki.
To be clear, the story in the game is made up by me. It’s not one you’ll find explicitly in mythology. I do however try to use characters, their relationships with the world or each other, and various mythological themes as a basis. I also take some liberties to make it amusing or functional. Eris’ relationships to her sister Hynos and her daughter Lethe are depicted accurately. The relationships between Gaia, Uranus, and Themis also make sense for my story. I use those to drive the story, but that doesn’t mean I’m not inventing some things as I go along.
At the core of the game Eris is a mythological character, and not an especially nice one. She is literally the goddess or personification of chaos, discord, and strife. In other words, she loves creating problems and watching chaos ensue. In my story, she does this on random planets. For each planet, this results in the people destroying each other and the elemental balance going totally out of whack.
This bothers other gods, and Eris gets condemned to fix a planet that was destroyed through her influence, and must do so as a human, mostly. Eris in human form would simply be a human woman. That’s a good start for a protagonist but it isn’t especially amusing on its own. The goddess Eris is often depicted with wings, but I don’t want you to be able to fly around all the time. That means that I’ve removed her wings because humans don’t have wings. See how I’ve set up a rule there? Something I definitely need to follow to make the story self consistent?
Naturally, I’ve also decided wings are fine if you’ve got a specific upgrade and that Eris can reduce her size and move around in the form of a cat, you know, like humans can obviously do. I wanted there to be a “small form” in my game because many metroidvania games have this concept. I’ve played games that allow your character to be smaller by turning into a ball, a chicken, an alien insect thing, or a bat. There isn’t any specific mythological connection to Eris ever taking a cat form, but it amused me, it solved the need for a small form, and I like cats. It doesn’t make any sense for a human to be able to turn into a cat, so I broke the rule I just carefully created for the wings.
It gets worse before it gets better. Games with small forms often have some form of bomb. A magic suit that breaks all the laws of physics and rearranges your guts into a convenient ball can drop bombs because there are no rules in that scenario. That leaves the question of “where does a cat get bombs?” I think the answer is pretty obvious. It doesn’t matter where they came from or how the cat seems to have an infinite supply of them. It only matters that if a cat had bombs, you can be sure they would definitely want to use them. So I’m going to make a new rule. If you are making a game and have rules you don’t like, make different rules or just throw them out in favor of things that amuse you and the player.